The quality of health care is constantly evolving and improving as new, less invasive surgical techniques, more effective medications, and better methods of treatment are constantly being discovered and invented. Improvements in health care have also occurred through better use and management of patient related medical information. By centrally storing patient information in a digital medium, medical personal are provided a readily accessible means of acquiring patient information. Such digital storage of patient information allows for fast searches to locate all previously entered patient information, sorting of the information to display only relevant information, and the ability to access the information from any location at any time so that doctors will be able to provide care even when absent from the hospital. Such examples are among the many benefits gained from the digitization and central storage of patient information within a medical environment.
Medical care providers have discovered that creating such digital medical databases often requires a dedicated set of resources to gather, transcribe, and manage the data. First, physicians, nurses, and other medical care providers generate clinical notes or rounding lists which include objective data acquired from monitors. These notes are composed by several individuals and different times throughout the day. As such, the notes often become disbursed in multiple places as each individual stores the data within separate files or as separate notes within the same file. The medical care members lose valuable time having to prepare and record such data. For instance, objective clinical information, such as the vital statistics displayed on a monitor (e.g., blood pressure monitors, heart rate monitors, etc.) attached to the patient, is data that has to be read from the monitor and manually transcribed to the notes at regular intervals. A clerical staff must then digitally transcribe the notes and rounding list information from the various medical care members into a digital database where they may be subsequently accessed by other medical members or where they may be subsequently accessed for report generation or performance analysis. This data is commonly entered within a single destination such as a hospital information system (HIS).
Such data acquisition and data entry obstacles impose burdens on already constrained resources of the medical care provider and raise costs for already expensive medical care provided by the medical care provider. Additionally, restricting access to the data, managing the data, and efficiently disseminating the data once it is entered within the HIS or other database are issues that further hinder the adoption and raise the costs associated with the use of such central storage solutions within the medical field.
Further complicating the issue are regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) that require certain medical data be privileged and thus be prohibited from access by various members of the medical care provider. For instance, while a surgeon of the medical care provider requires access to extensive medical data associated with the health history and treatment of a patient, a billing member of the medical care provider need only view what procedures were provided without having access to detailed information as to how the procedures were rendered or how a patient responded to such procedures.
Information overload is yet an additional concern for the medical care provider. From the above example, the billing member need only access the medical data that is relevant to bill for the services rendered. In some instances, the billing member is provided superfluous data from which the prevalent data must be manually parsed, causing the billing member to lose valuable time and resources. Similarly, information overload hinders those members responsible for treating the patient. Often, the physicians must parse through objective data that is unrelated to the patient's condition or the physicians must determine for themselves which of the data within the notes are relevant. Certain illnesses are best diagnosed or treated by examining only a select set of parameters, however those parameters may be disbursed unevenly and at various locations throughout the notes making it difficult for the physicians to find the relevant data.
Additionally, the data is sometimes unavailable to the parties that require it, because it has yet to be entered into the central database or because there is no efficient means for disseminating the data once it is entered. For instance, the effectiveness of a physician performing rounds is increased when a patient's vitals, labs, and other objective data are available to the physician prior to performing the rounds. Therefore, it would be helpful if such data was available when needed without the manual process of having the physician or the physician's assistant manually pull the data from the database prior to performing the rounds.
Therefore, there is a need to simplify the data aggregation processes used to build and populate the digitized database of medical data for a medical care provider. Of similar importance, is the need to simplify and to reduce the overhead associated with restricting access to the data, managing the data, and disseminating the data once it is entered into the digital database so that efficiency within the medical care provider increases and those members requiring the data are provided the necessary data in a timely manner. Such operations should be automated in an intelligent manner that reduces information overload while still providing relevant data to those members of the medical care provider that need such data.